


stay is a sensitive word

by concreteskies



Category: Emmerdale
Genre: F/F, i am just emotional about their little family okay let me be, this is rlly soft okay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-31
Updated: 2019-01-31
Packaged: 2019-10-20 01:44:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17613071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/concreteskies/pseuds/concreteskies
Summary: An exploration of vanity through the eyes of Noah.





	stay is a sensitive word

 

_stay is a sensitive word._

_we wear_

_who stayed_

_and who left_

_in our skin forever_

_-Nayyirah Waheed_

When Noah meets Vanessa Woodfield for the first time, he can see the way this is going to unfold. He gives them two months at best. He knows his mother, knows her track record and the way she exchanges partners time and time again. He watches their push and shove, the way they flirt and laugh and he is as surprised as anyone when his mum tells him that Vanessa is her girlfriend now, that she is different. He knows she isn’t. He knows that she is going to leave as soon as things get hard. That for all her blonde hair and yellow raincoats, she’s still going to leave his mum behind. They all do. It’s as inevitable as the tide slowly pulling water away from the shore. He doesn’t expect this time to be any different.

She is over tonight. Vanessa. Again. She seems to be living with them at this rate and he really thinks they went up to bed when he heads down for the kitchen. He doesn’t want to stumble upon this moment, not really. He merely wanted to get a tin of coke before returning to his game, but when he moves down to the living room, quietly as not to wake up his brother and Johnny, he hears soft voices filter out from within.

“Oh, you looked awful,” he hears his mum chuckle.

“Oi, I didn’t show you my prom pictures to have you mock me.”

“Oh please, the iridescent taffeta? You really thought I wouldn’t mock you?”

He doesn’t know what makes him stop in his tracks, what prevents him from going in. The door is slightly ajar and he can see the two of them sitting on the sofa, shoulders brushing against each other, both focused on what he imagines to be one of Vanessa’s old photo albums in their laps. His mother’s head is at a slight angle so that it’s almost resting against Vanessa’s.

“So what did you look like then? It was the nineties, none of us left them unharmed.”

His mother doesn’t reply. Instead, she straightens up a little. He can see, even from his position behind them, that she is lifting her chin, clenches her jaw: A telltale sign that she does not want to talk about whatever this is.

“Charity?” Vanessa, to her credit, must have also learned his mother’s tells, because her voice is cautious, yet surprisingly determined.

“Never really did the whole prom thing,” she shrugs a little and turns over the page in the photo album. He can see Vanessa’s eyes go wide and he imagines her mentally kicking herself for not thinking about this beforehand. They both know of his mum’s past now. The whole village does. But the little implications of her past are rarely regarded, these small sadnesses, like the fact that she has never gone to prom.

He watches as Vanessa moves her hand to cover his mum’s. She takes it, gently so, and lifts it to her mouth to brush two small kisses against her knuckles. “I’m sorry, I didn’t think,” she says. Her eyes are wide and genuine when she speaks and that’s not really something they’ve had a whole lot of in this family.

“It’s fine,” his mum replies. It sounds lofty, but he can hear the slight tremor in her voice and knows without looking at her that Vanessa does too.

“It’s not.”

“It’s just a stupid, silly thing, I hardly missed out.”

“Exactly,” Vanessa says, more a whisper than anything else. “It’s stupid and silly and fun and you deserved to have a childhood full of these things.”

He sees the way his mum turns to her now. The light casts shadows across her face which make it impossible for him to make out her expression. He leans in a little more closely to get a better look and regrets it almost immediately, because his mother has now leaned forward to kiss Vanessa. It’s not like any kiss he’s ever seen her involved in. (And there’s been quite a lot, with quite a lot of different people if he is being honest.) But nothing came close to this. There is nothing harsh about this kiss, nothing grabbing, nothing that reminds him of the endless push and shove between her and the men in the past. It is… gentle, if you can believe it. Vanessa’s hand comes up to cover his mum’s cheek and then slides backwards to her neck to pull her in a  little closer. His mother leans forward willingly and then, and Noah is screaming on the inside when he sees it, she nuzzles her nose against Vanessa’s for a brief second before pulling away. When they part, his mum leans her forehead against Vanessa’s and they stay like this for a moment, gazing.

“Not that I didn’t enjoy it, but what was this for?” Vanessa asks gently and for the first time he is grateful to her, because he would like to know the same, would like to make sense of this somehow. He is almost hoping for an ulterior motive, because if she doesn’t offer Vanessa to head up to the bedroom right now, he isn’t entirely sure what’s happening here.

His mother chuckles a little, a hoarse, small thing of a laugh that he’s never heard before. “You’re the first person to believe that I deserve good things to happen to me.”

It almost knocks him out cold the vulnerability laced into her voice. He can feel his hand clench around the doorknob. He wants to turn away and go upstairs, but Vanessa is standing up from the sofa now and surely she isn’t going to leave his mum because of this, right? 

“What are you doing?” His mum asks and he assumes that the same thought must have crossed her mind as well, because her voice is just ever so slightly shaking.

Vanessa just holds out her hand though and does an approximation of a bow.

“Charity Dingle, may I have this dance?”

His mum laughs at that and it sounds a little bit like she is out of breath and a little bit like happiness. “There isn’t any music.”

Vanessa pulls out her phone and selects a song. A guitar starts playing softly and she places the phone on the sofa before holding out her hand again. He watches as his mum gently places her hand in hers and allows Vanessa to pull her up and into her arms. It is a slow, gentle song and mostly they just sway, barely moving from their spot. His mum steps into Vanessa a little bit further, allows her hands to tighten where she has wrapped them around her lower back.   

He watches them for a while, entranced and a little confused at what he is seeing, but he feels like he is intruding and is beginning to step away when he hears Vanessa whisper, “So, what would you say… how was your first prom dance? Or well, prom sway?”

“Hmm, not too bad,” his mum replies and he sees the way Vanessa leans back a little from their embrace to look up at her.

“Not too bad?”

“Well you know, I was really hoping my date would kiss me but-“

Vanessa doesn’t let her finish and merely leans in to press a small, but lingering kiss to his mum’s lips. It’s then that he decides he’s seen enough and tiptoes back up to his room, coke forgotten.

He wishes he hadn’t witnessed this, because now it’s going to get harder. Not even to believe that Vanessa is going to leave, everyone leaves eventually, but to believe that his mum would be okay afterwards.

 

* * *

 

 

He knows the court case is hitting his mother hard. He has politely tried to ignore the tear tracks she has covered up for his sake. He has seen the way she sits down at the end of every day, like the weight of it is pressing her down, like she’s too exhausted to continue with any of this. He has counted the glasses of wine she’s had, the way she reaches for the bottle like it is some kind of haven. What he has also seen, however, is Vanessa. Vanessa in the mornings when she makes his mum a cup of tea, he knows is too weak, but she always drinks anyway. Vanessa giving her a kiss on the cheek when she steps out of the door. Vanessa whispering a soft “knock ‘em dead,” whenever another lawyer, another person somehow involved in this wants to speak to his mum. Vanessa always holding onto his mother’s hand when they are having dinner. They do it under the table because they think they are being sneaky, but he keeps dropping forks as an excuse to peak under the table and every time, without fail, they are holding on to each other.

It’s been a long week. It’s been a long set of weeks, if he is honest, and they’re all exhausted. It’s a Tuesday and usually Vanessa goes back home on Tuesday nights, because Johnny is staying with her dad, but she has to drop him off at nursery the next morning. When he heads out to the bathroom though, he can still see a light from his mum’s bedroom and hears the muffled whisper of their voices.

“What can I do?” he hears Vanessa, as he steps closer.

There is a brief moment of silence before his mum’s voice follows, “Can you just stay?”

“Of course.”

He leaves for the bathroom after that and tries not to think about what he just heard, the way his mum’s voice had sounded slightly choked up like she had been crying, the way his mum, who never reaches for anyone, reached for Vanessa.

 

* * *

 

 

There is a party at the Woolpack. It’s weeks after they all went to court and won, weeks after his mother broke down with the weight of it, weeks after she saved herself from it. It’s weeks after everything happened and things went into a strange kind of normal. This normal involves Vanessa being there more mornings than not. It involves the two of them watching boring soaps and movies in the evenings. Vanessa is into romantic comedies (shocker) and his mum mocks them endlessly, but watches them all anyway. He even once saw her wipe away a tear at the end of _Notting Hill_. “It’s really beautiful okay?” She had exclaimed when they had both laughed at her and Vanessa had grinned and whispered something involving the word “softie” into her ear that he didn’t catch entirely. He did watch on as his mother doled out a playful slap to Vanessa’s arm in response. They had both been smiling though, which had also become part of the new normal, the smiling. It’s been a nice change and the party seems to have come at just the right time. Everybody is a little bit giddy and a little bit tipsy and no one seems to know what the party is really for except for their collective want for one. Even Sarah and Debbie are here, dancing in the centre of the dance floor in a small mother-daughter dance. His mum is behind the counter, serving alcohol and soft drinks to the kids and Vanessa is somewhere in the crowd. He catches her whenever she starts dancing again, because her moves are... unique and the waving hands are hard to overlook.

His mum must have stepped out for a moment, because next thing he knows she is sliding on a chair next to him.

“Enjoying the party?” She asks and passes him another tin of coke.

“It’s good, yes.”

They both watch the people gathered in the middle of the makeshift dance floor. It’s small and stacked, but everybody seems to be having a good time for once, so nobody minds too much if they bump into someone or spill drinks.

Vanessa is dancing next to Tracy, her entire body engaged with it, hands held over her head, whacking them from side to side awkwardly, but grinning all the same.

He looks over at his mum, who has also found Vanessa in the crowd and is watching her, except she is doing it with that dopey smile on her face he is slowly becoming used to.

“She is so lame,” he hears himself say with a laugh. His mum turns over to face him and the grin on her face nearly makes him drop from his stool.

“She is,” his mum says, but her smile is so fond and the way she immediately turns to seek out Vanessa in the crowd again makes him smile a little as well, stupidly sentimental, which is also something that is becoming a part of the new normal and which he absolutely cannot stand.

“You’re really lame too,” he says, purely because he has friends hereto  and can’t be seen emotional over the fact that his mum and her girlfriend are the biggest losers to have ever fallen in love.

His mum just grins at him though and replies, “I know.” She winks at him and then slides off her stool to join her girlfriend on the dance floor, hands waving and all. He stays on his stool and takes a sip of his coke and thinks _thank god you two found each other._

 

* * *

 

 

Vanessa moves in on a Thursday. She comes with a lot of boxes and at least four blankets that have some variation of yellow in them. She keeps looking over at him in brief glances like she somehow expects him to kick her out. She also keeps asking him whether he is okay with her moving in. “I want you to be comfortable with this too.” It’s nice in a way, knowing that she genuinely cares what he thinks. None of the others ever did. None of the others ever made his favourite dinner, followed up by three of his favourite desserts to bribe him either. He doesn’t mind her and Johnny being here. He likes the kid and he supposes he doesn’t mind Vanessa that much anymore. It’s when he comes into the living room after dinner to grab his school bag though, that he realizes how much happiness she brought with her by moving in.

He walks in to his mother standing in front of the heap of unpacked boxes, sliding her hand across the surface of them. She touches them gently, gingerly almost, which he hadn’t seen her do a lot before Vanessa came around. She turns around as soon as she hears him in the doorway, looking like he caught her somehow.

“We’re gonna try and tidy the rest of it away tomorrow,” she gestures at the boxes, one hand still remaining placed on top of the one she had been inspecting.  

“It’s fine.” He mumbles and shrugs as he reaches for his bag.

“You are-“ his mum starts speaking before clearing her throat and starting over. “You are okay with this, right?” He turns to look at her to give her a shrug like he usually does, but something about the way she is standing there makes him reconsider. She is clenching and unclenching the hand that remains at her side and there is something nearly fearful in her eyes, like she also expects for this fragile family to break apart again, like she hopes it’s not now, not with him.

“I am,” he says. She nods at that reply and turns to look at one of the boxes. A blanket peaks out at the top and he steps closer before he can help himself. “What’s with all the yellow anyway?”

“I know,” his mum laughs. “It’s like a sunflower exploded in here.”

“Or just the sun,” he says it in a dry tone, but he can see that her eyes are getting that faraway look at the linkage of Vanessa and the sun and he has to roll his eyes at her.

“What?”

“You are so whipped.”

“I’m not,” she actually manages to sound indignant, which he guesses he should commend her for.

“Okay then, I hope you and all your new yellow things will be very happy together,” he tries to sound scathing, but it comes out genuine instead.

“Me too,” she replies. “And-“

“Yes, I’m sure I’m okay with it, please stop asking, it’s weird. Having Vanessa round is… nice. She can actually cook and knows maths and you laugh more when she is around as well, so it’s all good.”

Her eyes go soft at his words and he rolls his eyes again and turns around to the door with his backpack slung across his shoulders. “Whipped,” he calls out one more time before quickly exiting the room and pulling the door shut. He still hears the sound of an undoubtedly yellow pillow being thrown in his direction and the way it bounces off the door.

 

* * *

 

 

He only knows the gist of this week’s drama in the house of Dingle. There is something about a fight between Chas and his mum that escalated rather quickly, something about his mum lying and then lashing out at Chas. It’s all he really needs to know anyway. He has seen variations of this fight before, has lived with the silence hanging between them in the house for days and weeks before. He really doesn’t need to be involved. He only wanted a piece of toast and to then return to his room, but as he walks down the stairs, he can hear a door slam and his mother storm into the living room, Vanessa on her heels. They leave the door open and he sighs and sits down on the steps, residing himself to waiting for his toast until they have resolved whatever this is. He must have joined them mid-argument because the next thing that happens is that his mother whirls around to face Vanessa and shouts more than she asks, “whose side are you on anyway? So much for loyalty huh?”

“Oh my god,” Vanessa replies, voice raised, but not carrying as much fervor, “I’m always on your side.” She gains both speed and volume as she continues on. “I’m never going to be on anyone else’s side ever again. That doesn’t mean that I can’t also tell you that you’ve messed up here and that Chas is right.”

He thinks his mum is going to lash out and he is going to have to listen to them scream at each other for a couple minutes and that he might as well go upstairs, because this isn’t going to be resolved easily, but what happens next keeps him seated on the stairs with intrigue. Instead of lashing out and telling Vanessa that she is clearly siding with Chas then, if she tells her she is wrong, he watches his mum deflate visibly.

“You’re always going to be on my side?” She asks, her voice so timid he almost doesn’t catch it from his position outside the living room.

“Yes,” Vanessa sighs. “And if you haven’t realized that by now, you’re really more dense than I thought.” She is standing with her back to him, but he can still tell she is smiling a little right now, if only from the way his mum’s face splits open with a smile in response.

“I love you always okay? Even when you’re occasionally doing the wrong thing or are making questionable choices. But I’m not going to just sit by and watch you do it. I am going to call you out, because I know you’re better than this.” Vanessa takes a step forwards until she is standing close enough to take his mum’s hand into hers. His mum lets it happen, which is, once again, unprecedented, closeness even during a fight.

“I’ve told you before that I’m just about the best version of myself when I’m with you, you’re giving me too much credit when it comes to other people.”

“You’re trying though and that in itself is beautiful,” Vanessa offers his mum a small nod at the end of her speech and he can see the way his mum looks up into her eyes, the way she swallows until she drops her gaze to the floor.

“What?” Vanessa asks.

“Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For staying with me even when I am not very lovable, for not leaving every time it gets too hard to be with me.”

“It’s never hard to be with you, I wish you’d realize that.” He watches his mum smile at that, not quite believing her but grateful nonetheless.

“Well I do realize that you might have a point here and… I will apologize to Chas.”

“Good,” Vanessa says simply and that’s that. “Come here,” he thinks he hears her whisper and he watches as his mum slips easily into Vanessa’s arms. Her hands come around her waist to pull her a little bit closer and her head rests easily against Vanessa’s shoulder, eyes closed, face soft. Vanessa squeezes her a little, but they remain like this, just wrapped up in each other. It looks easy, but he knows from watching his mum that things like this, vulnerability, soft touches, have never been anything close to it.

He decides to leave them be and that his toast can wait. He does his best to tiptoe back into his room and it’s only when he reaches it that he realizes why today’s events have felt so puzzling to him. No one has ever stayed with his mum when she was like this, righteous and angry, lashing out at anyone who came into proximity. But Vanessa is still down there, holding her, and it’s only then that he realizes that Vanessa loves his mum. On some level he always knew that, but he always thought that she would realize, as everyone ultimately does, that it wasn’t as simple as that, that love wasn’t enough. But Vanessa _loves_ his mum. She loves her when she is kind, and she loves her when she is cruel and she loves her in all the in between moments as well. He thinks they might be okay after all.

 

* * *

  

Vanessa has been in hospital for a week and he can see the toll it’s taking on his mum. He went by a couple times, brought flowers and a magazine and all. Vanessa had been cheery, as she always is, but even he could see how pale she still looked, how deep the circles underneath her eyes were carving away at her. It was hard, seeing her like this, reduced like this. It’s even harder to see his mum though. She ghosts along the hallways in the mornings. He knows she doesn’t sleep right. He peaked into her room one night to check in on her and saw her curled around Vanessa’s pillow, duvet discarded on the floor next to her. She had been asleep for once, so he had closed the door gently and set his alarm for the next morning to prevent the boys from waking her.

He needn’t have bothered. He hears her wake at 6 anyway. For a brief moment he considers turning around and going back to sleep, but then he decides to join her this morning. He moves down to the living room, where she is already sitting on the sofa with a cup of tea he knows she’s not going to drink. She is staring at the wall in front of her, wrapped in one of the knitted blankets Vanessa brought over when she moved in.

“Morning,” he tries to keep his voice gentle as not to startle her, but it comes out rough anyway.

“Hey, sweetheart,” she says, turning around a little to face him, before frowning. “Up so early?”

“Yeah, couldn’t sleep,” he lies.

“Yeah.” He waits for her to add anything else to this, but apparently there is nothing to say. They don’t really do this. Talk. Especially when it’s about feelings, but yesterday when they went to the hospital, Vanessa had held him back a second and told him to “please watch out for her, okay?” and he had nodded and decided to try. He isn’t good at this though, taking care of his mum. Nobody ever really was, least of all herself, until Vanessa came along. She was the first to try, he knows that much. And he is going to try now.

“She’ll be fine, you know?” He says. He doesn’t know how to start this conversation, so he sort of just blurts it out and cringes at himself for his lack of tact.

His mum turns to him. She looks surprised ,but a sort of subdued version of the emotion. (Every emotion is subdued recently by sheer fatigue and stress.)

“I know,” she says and visibly forces a smile, “single most stubborn woman I ever met.”

“I used to think she was going to leave us,” he blurts out again, surprised by his own honesty.

His mum’s expression immediately turns defensive and he holds up his hands in defense. “Everybody always left, okay? I didn’t really think she was going to stay.”

He watches her deflate at that. “Me too,” she admits quietly then and he can feel his eyes widening with confusion.

“What?” Whenever that topic had come up, his mum was usually ready to tell him that Vanessa was different, that things were different, never this.

“I don’t think I’ve been very good at holding on to things in the past. I never really wanted to anyway. But with her…”

“You wanted to keep her.”

“I did-“ She stops herself. “I do.”

He nods like he understands, except he doesn’t.

“I was surprised as well. At first when I met her, it was a bit of fun, you know, but then-“ she shrugs a little, helpless almost, like she doesn’t know what happened either.

“You fell in love with her by accident.”

His mum smiles a little at that, but nods. “Yeah, I think that’s probably it.” She sighs. “Quite inconvenient, that was. She was just….different. Gentle, but still so unbelievably bossy it’s beyond infuriating, just kept believing in me, just kept sticking around until I actually trusted her to stay.”

“She’s not leaving now.”

“I know. If she knows what’s good for her, she won’t leave me because she was stabbed in front of my pub.”

“I… I kind of hoped she was going to leave at first. Then I sort of started to believe that she might stay and I don’t know… you can never tell her I said this okay, she will start crying and start hugging me and then it’ll be a whole thing okay?”

“Okay?”

“Well, I kind of want her to stay as well, okay? I like her and… I really want you – us – to keep her okay?”

His mum’s eyes well up at that and for a brief moment he is afraid that she is going to start crying. Instead, she just leans over to him and hugs him tightly, not saying a word. They don’t really do hugs either and he sort of awkwardly pats her back a little, while trying to figure out how it works. She doesn’t seem to mind it.

“Do you think it’s too early to go to the hospital?” She asks when she finally pulls away from him and doesn’t look so very close to tears anymore.

“Well, I guess the nurses there already hate you anyway so we might as well.”

 

* * *

 

Sunday mornings are usually reserved for his mum and Vanessa. Moses and Johnny get to watch Telly in the morning, he sleeps in anyway and he knows that the two of them stay in bed as long as they can get away with, before either one of the boys demands their attention. He usually doesn’t catch any of it, as he is usually sleeping, but Johnny decided that “you play with us this morning,” and hadn’t stopped jumping up and down on his bed until he had relented. He is on his way downstairs to get some coffee that his mum tries to keep him from having, when he sees her walk up the hall and to their bedroom. She is carrying two cups of tea, but it’s what she is wearing that makes him stop in his tracks for a moment. On top of her pajamas she has thrown on one of Vanessa’s chunky yellow sweaters. She had once told him that the day she wears yellow is the day a part of her soul dies. This, of course, was years ago. Years ago in a time he has now deemed _BV_. Before Vanessa. He watches as she opens the door with her elbow and kicks it a little so that she can usher through.

“Good morning, sleepy head, hope you slept well and warm with _all_ of the duvet tonight,” he hears her say with an overly cheerful voice she does to annoy Vanesa.

“It’s hardly _all_ of the duvet,” comes the prompt reply. They do variations of this conversation every single morning. He knows how this goes. He’s grinning anyway.

“Oh yes, I forgot that this tiny corner of it was designated to me, how thoughtful.”

He hears Vanessa’s low laugh and if this is like any other morning he had to suffer through their lovey-dovey look-how-cute-we-are-we-squabble-about-the-duvet conversation, he knows that by now his mum has handed her the tea and is probably pressing a small kiss to the crown of her head, before slipping back into bed herself. (She is probably gathering all of the duvet to her side now.)

He’s glad it’s just the duvet they fight about, even now, 7 months after Vanessa’s moved in. Nothing else.

 

* * *

 

 

“So, are your parents here?” He hears his friend Mia whisper from behind him. They're both standing in line to get on the stage where they're going to receive their university diploma and she has been poking him in the back the entire time. They’re both wearing dramatic black robes and black hats that seem a bit overkill and he can’t wait to throw both items in the back of his closet and never wear them again. He does know though that once he gets home, he will have to pose for at least another hundred pictures, like Vanessa didn’t run out of memory this morning already.

He peaks around the corner and scans the crowd of people ahead. They’re sitting in the third row, his three brothers, each wearing a suit that he can more or less stand and Debbie with her children. And then, right next to the aisle, his mum and Vanessa are sitting next to each other, hands linked.

“Yes, they’re both here,” he replies with a smile.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed it.  
> tumblr: dancingontiptoes  
> twitter: concreteskies


End file.
